The clubs have settled the fee and he has settled his wages. What remains is a medical and a photograph, and around Liverpool people have started saying his name in the past tense.
$64.8M was the most the club would pay and Chelsea were asking for more. Deals like this are revived in the last week of a window roughly half the time, and everybody involved knows it.
Liverpool have gone to Birmingham with a bid, and the supporters have gone to the internet with an opinion about it. Whether either changes anything is up to the selling club.
“I listened, I thought about it, and I am staying. That is the whole story.” The clubs had agreed a fee. Conor Bradley had not agreed to go, which turned out to be the part that mattered.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Harvey Davies is 23, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Nobody makes a documentary about a hamstring and everybody in the game fears one. Liverpool will be careful with the return date, because the second one is always worse than the first.
In brief
SquadMiloš Kerkez falls out with a teammate over standards
Levi Colwill and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
It is never announced and it is entirely visible: the biggest afternoons of the season keep containing him. A press box works this out long before anybody at the club confirms a word of it.
He asked about his future and was given an answer with minutes in it. The manager has now made a promise in a building where promises are remembered, and the clock on it has started.
67 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Liverpool lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
18 goals in 17 games at Wigan Athletic — numbers that travel home faster than he does. Somebody at Liverpool updates a spreadsheet every Monday, and it makes better reading each week.
Successful dribbles: 19. He went past people as if he had been told there was a prize for it, and by the end the full-back had stopped pretending to try.
Marked 8.36 — the sort of number a correspondent writes down twice to be sure. Everything he tried came off, and what he did not try was not worth trying.
It is never announced and it is entirely visible: the biggest afternoons of the season keep containing him. A press box works this out long before anybody at the club confirms a word of it.
“We earned that. I asked them for a reaction and I got one, and now I want the same again on Saturday.” Timothy King on a 1‑0 afternoon that pleased him more than he was prepared to show.
In brief
Loan watchThe goals keep arriving from Jayden Danns’s exile
74 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Liverpool lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
2 kept out from twelve yards, and a stadium that will describe each of them for twenty years. A goalkeeper needs one night like this in a career, and this was it.
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Alexander Isak provided it, and the 9.39 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
8 without defeat on their own grass. The pitch has not changed; the crowd has — louder earlier, and quicker to sense when the opposition would rather be somewhere else.